He was educated at Eton College, Trinity College, Cambridge and the London Business School, after which he was a visiting research fellow at Princeton University in 1980-1981, and then a research fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge in 1981-1982. From academia he moved to become Special Adviser to Keith Joseph, the Secretary of State for Education and Science between 1982 and 1983, and then a member of the Prime Minister's Policy Unit from 1983 to 1986, where he was one of the brains behind privatisation and a champion of the poll tax. Oliver subsequently left politics in 1986 and joined the merchant bank NM Rothschild and Sons where he was employed in their privatisation department, busily advising foreign governments on how to have their own Thatcherite revolution, and eventually became a director in 1991.

Political career

Oliver's first attempt at securing a seat was his home constituency of Hampstead and Highgate where he lost out to Labour's Glenda Jackson at the 1992 General Election. He afterwards transferred his attentions to the constituency of Dorset West where he was returned at the 1997 General Election with a majority of 1,840, although of course his party was defeated and forced out of government.

He subsequently enjoyed something of a meteoric rise within the somewhat depleted Conservative ranks. Just over a year after first being elected to the Commons, he was appointed the Frontbench Spokesman for Constitutional Affairs in June 1998 and then two years later in September 2000, he became Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury. However he first came to public prominence during 2001 General Election when, during the campaign, he gave an interview to the Financial Times in which he suggested that a Conservative government could slash taxes by £20bn a year during its first term in office, a statement that naturally gave rise to accusations that the Conservatives would need to cut public expenditure by a similar amount. Apparently this did not go down well with William Hague, and Oliver was famously forced into 'hiding' for the remainder of the campaign, much to the amusement of the Labour Party who produced a fake wanted poster with Oliver's mugshot whilst Gordon Brown appeared at a news conference to plead, "Let Letwin speak. We should free the Dorset One!".

Whether or not Letwin's remarks had any effect on the election result isn't known, in any case the Conservative Party lost the 2001 General Election as comprehensively as the previous election. Hague resigned as party leader, and in the subsequent contest Oliver supported Michael Portillo, demonstrating his support for the modernising wing of the party, but despite backing the losing candidate, the new party leader Iain Duncan Smith appointed him as Shadow Home Secretary in September 2001. There he remained until November 2003 when Smith's replacement Michael Howard made him Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, although he was slightly peeved at being obliged to resign his position as part-time director of NM Rothschild after facing accusations of a potential conflict of interest.

By this time Letwin had to moved to the left of the party. Having once described himself as "a radical Thatcherite" and been regarded as the intellectuals' Norman Tebbit, the experience of two successive election defeats appears to have caused him to modify his views. As Oliver put it himself; "I've completely changed my view, I've come to the conclusion that the most important thing we can do for the country is to improve the hospitals and the schools and the policing. To do that, you have to have fundamental structural reform, and you have to put the money in to enable those reforms to work", whilst David Davies went so far as to describe him as a "Hampstead liberal".

Given the slender majority of only 1,414 that he'd enjoyed at the 2001 election, he was one of the prime targets of the Liberal Democrats much-vaunted decapitation strategy at the 2005 General Election, although as it happened Oliver beat off the challenge and even increased his majority to 2,461. His party, of course, was defeated once more at that General Election and Oliver subsequently took a step down from the Treasury and became Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, apparently at his own request as he wanted to be able to return to gainful employment at NM Rothschild.

He supported David Cameron in the subsequent leadership election, and after Cameron duly won that contest, he agreed in December 2005 to serve as Chairman of the Party's Policy Review and Chairman of the Conservative Research Department. Often referred to as the 'Head of Policy' he therefore has been playing a key role in Cameron's re-invention of the Conservative Party. Once spoken of as a potential future leader of the party he now appears to have put such ambitions aside .